Post by the Scribe on Nov 8, 2020 7:28:23 GMT
Why the polls were wrong about Trump (again)
www.yahoo.com/news/why-the-polls-were-wrong-about-trump-again-234138787.html
Andrew RomanoWest Coast Correspondent,Yahoo News•November 4, 2020
www.yahoo.com/news/why-the-polls-were-wrong-about-trump-again-234138787.html
Andrew RomanoWest Coast Correspondent,Yahoo News•November 4, 2020
Researchers have largely ruled out the idea of “shy Trump voters” who lie to pollsters and say they’re undecided or that they favor someone else when they really favor Trump. But it’s possible, Grossman and Morris speculated, that pro-Trump, non-college-educated whites are simply less inclined to pick up the phone or participate in polls than pro-Biden, non-college-educated whites.
Why? Because the pro-Trump cohort also tends to have less “social trust” — i.e., less “trust in other people or institutions,” as Morris put it. Spurred by Trump’s “fake news” mantra, participating in polls may have itself become politicized. When overall response rates are as low as 4 percent, this could skew the results against Trump in places like the Rust Belt or Texas.
A similar dynamic may have also made it seem like more Republicans were flipping from Trump to Biden than ultimately did — again, because pro-Trump Republicans may be less inclined than pro-Biden Republicans to answer a pollster’s call or participate in an online survey.
Other potential reasons for 2020’s big miss may have been beyond anyone’s control. It’s unlikely that late-breaking voters who decided within the last week made the difference, even though they told exit pollsters they favored Trump over Biden by 14 percentage points. There simply weren’t enough of them this year — just 4 to 5 percent of the overall electorate vs. about 14 percent in 2016 — to explain Trump’s overperformance on Election Day.
A more plausible scenario, Morris said, is that a significant number of pandemic-induced mail ballots are either arriving late, or being rejected, or not being returned at all. If tons of people tell pollsters they’ve voted by mail and then, for whatever reason, some those “likely votes” don’t actually count on Election Day, it could widen the gap between the polls and the results.
Political scientists and pollsters will debate these problems for years to come, and they’ll probably devise new approaches to deal with them. But after being told that Joe Biden could win in a landslide — and then watching as Trump beat his polls by even more than 2016 in state after state — the broader public might be more inclined to dismiss political surveys in the future.
There are “systematic problems that they haven’t solved since 2016, and in fact seem to be worse this time,” Morris said. “That’s pretty troubling if you’re a pollster — especially if you’ve spent the last four years trying to reckon with the fact that polls were missing Trump supporters. So they have a big reckoning ahead of them.”
Why? Because the pro-Trump cohort also tends to have less “social trust” — i.e., less “trust in other people or institutions,” as Morris put it. Spurred by Trump’s “fake news” mantra, participating in polls may have itself become politicized. When overall response rates are as low as 4 percent, this could skew the results against Trump in places like the Rust Belt or Texas.
A similar dynamic may have also made it seem like more Republicans were flipping from Trump to Biden than ultimately did — again, because pro-Trump Republicans may be less inclined than pro-Biden Republicans to answer a pollster’s call or participate in an online survey.
Other potential reasons for 2020’s big miss may have been beyond anyone’s control. It’s unlikely that late-breaking voters who decided within the last week made the difference, even though they told exit pollsters they favored Trump over Biden by 14 percentage points. There simply weren’t enough of them this year — just 4 to 5 percent of the overall electorate vs. about 14 percent in 2016 — to explain Trump’s overperformance on Election Day.
A more plausible scenario, Morris said, is that a significant number of pandemic-induced mail ballots are either arriving late, or being rejected, or not being returned at all. If tons of people tell pollsters they’ve voted by mail and then, for whatever reason, some those “likely votes” don’t actually count on Election Day, it could widen the gap between the polls and the results.
Political scientists and pollsters will debate these problems for years to come, and they’ll probably devise new approaches to deal with them. But after being told that Joe Biden could win in a landslide — and then watching as Trump beat his polls by even more than 2016 in state after state — the broader public might be more inclined to dismiss political surveys in the future.
There are “systematic problems that they haven’t solved since 2016, and in fact seem to be worse this time,” Morris said. “That’s pretty troubling if you’re a pollster — especially if you’ve spent the last four years trying to reckon with the fact that polls were missing Trump supporters. So they have a big reckoning ahead of them.”